


There Was Still Time

by LulaIsAKitten



Series: StrikeFicExchange prompts [13]
Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, Fluff, Happy Ending, Mutual Pining, Romance, Valentine Ball, Valentine's Challenge, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-18 10:01:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29366682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LulaIsAKitten/pseuds/LulaIsAKitten
Summary: For Flanker27_UK, for the prompt:Robin and Cormoran  have to attend a Valentine Ball following a suspectThey see a man sitting on his own, date not turned upRobin feels sorry for him and wonders whyCormoran likewise but thinks he may end up alone himself unless....
Relationships: Robin Ellacott/Cormoran Strike
Series: StrikeFicExchange prompts [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1368862
Comments: 30
Kudos: 73
Collections: Cormoran Strike Valentine’s Day 2021 Prompt Meme Fun





	There Was Still Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Flanker27_UK](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flanker27_UK/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [Flanker27_UK](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flanker27_UK/pseuds/Flanker27_UK) in the [Cormoran_Strike_Valentines_Day_2021_Prompt_Meme](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Cormoran_Strike_Valentines_Day_2021_Prompt_Meme) collection. 



> For Flanker27_UK, for the prompt:
> 
> Robin and Cormoran have to attend a Valentine Ball following a suspect
> 
> They see a man sitting on his own, date not turned up
> 
> Robin feels sorry for him and wonders why
> 
> Cormoran likewise but thinks he may end up alone himself unless....

The doorbell rang, and Robin’s heart lurched. She refused to look at Max, choosing to ignore his sideways smile as she set down the small brandy he’d poured her - “for your nerves,” and he’d just grinned when she’d insisted she wasn’t nervous - and picked up her bag.

“Enjoy your date!” her housemate called after her as she started down the stairs.

“For the last time, it’s work!” Robin shouted back as she rounded the bend and set off down the next flight.

“Yeah, yeah,” she faintly heard, and then she reached the bottom hallway and opened the door, and there was Strike.

She forced her expression to stay professional, a friendly smile, even as her eyes raked over him, his navy Italian suit freshly dry cleaned under his big greatcoat, a deep maroon tie with an abstract pattern picked out knotted neatly at the collar of his crisp white shirt. She pretended not to notice the way his eyes performed a similar manoeuvre, taking in her black cocktail dress and neat kitten heeled shoes, the pendant her parents had given her for her thirtieth birthday nestled at her throat and the matching earrings they’d given her for Christmas adorning her earlobes. She definitely, definitely ignored the frisson of heat that ran through her as he offered his arm and she tried not to wonder if he liked what he’d seen.

“Shall we?” her partner said with mock gallantry, and Robin giggled and set her hand in the crook of his elbow. It was all of three steps to his waiting taxi, and then she was settled back against the leather seat and they were being whisked across London.

“Did you bring the camera?” Robin asked, striving for normality even as she wondered if the cabbie thought they were on a date.

_Of course he does, Ellacott. You’re dressed up to the nines, on Valentine’s Day, going to a Valentine’s Ball. Of course it looks like a date._

_If only,_ her treacherous subconscious whispered, and she ignored that, too.

“Nah,” her big partner replied, sounding much more at ease than Robin felt. “It would look a bit suspicious. Phone pics will do, and anyway I think it might be sound recordings we need.”

“Yeah,” Robin agreed. “The wife says he’ll definitely be here?”

“Yup. He told her he had a corporate dinner.”

“On Valentine’s Day?”

“Well, exactly. He must have a pretty low opinion of her intelligence. Or he doesn’t care any more. But anyway, she found the tickets to this ball in his pocket.”

Robin shook her head slightly, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Strike grin at her. “Hey, don’t knock it. We get a free fancy night out. Shame it’s only a buffet, not a sit-down meal. He could at least cheat in style.”

“Cormoran!” Robin couldn’t help laughing.

Strike shrugged. “At least we could have had a three-course dinner for the money he’s paying.”

“I thought the wife was paying for our tickets?”

Strike chuckled. “It was his name on the receipt stub. Think she used his credit card.”

Robin snorted. “Excellent. We’ll make sure we eat plenty, then!”

“Oh, I’m planning to.” Then he grinned at her. “And I’ll try and behave myself a little better than I did this time last year.”

Robin giggled, and just like that they were chatting easily as they always did.

Within fifteen minutes, they were pulling up outside the manor house on the edge of a park that had been booked for the evening’s entertainment. Robin scrambled out of the cab as Strike held the door for her. The front of the house was decorated with red balloons and fairy lights.

“Tacky,” Strike murmured as he slammed the taxi door and moved to pay the driver.

Robin couldn’t help but agree, looking around at the overdecorated space, the maître d’ beckoning them forward.

“Is that...a sleigh?” Robin muttered, peering through a side gate towards the sound of jingling bells.

Strike snorted. “I think so. Tackier and tackier.”

Robin giggled, and pulled her face straight as they approached the door and Strike handed over the tickets. She remembered that they were supposed to be a couple, and tucked her hand into his elbow again, and he squeezed her arm against his side, a fond gesture for the maître d’s benefit that nevertheless made her heart ache a little, longing for the feeling behind the gesture to be real and not just for show.

_Stop it, Ellacott._

Strike knew as soon as they entered the building that this whole evening had been a mistake. He’d thought that it would just be a quick, easily accomplished mission - they only needed evidence of their mark definitely being in a couple with his work colleague after all, something that would prove beyond doubt that this wasn’t somehow a working evening for them. A Valentine’s Ball, with romance seeping from its every pore, was perfect, he’d reasoned.

He really hadn’t thought this through. Robin looked stunning in a little black cocktail dress that moulded to her figure, the pendant he’d admired on her thirtieth birthday nestled at her throat and wafts of Narciso assailing his senses. Her arm tucked through his felt as though it belonged there, and her blue-grey eyes twinkled at him.

“In here.” Having taken their coats and handed them a cloakroom ticket, the maître d’ ushered them through a side door into a small room with a fake archway set up in the middle of it, lighting apparatus around and a grinning photographer dressed all in black with her hair tied back in a ponytail.

“What’s this?” Strike baulked in the doorway.

“We thought we’d do the photos on the way in, so no one forgets later,” the young man replied. “That’s Grace, she’s our photographer for the evening.” And he bustled away to welcome the next couple.

The blonde woman smiled at them. “Under the archway, please!” she trilled.

“Um—” Strike hesitated, but Robin tugged on his arm.

“Come on, darling,” she said eagerly. “He hates having his picture taken,” she told Grace, an air of apology in her tone.

“Ah, we’ll soon set him at ease,” the photographer replied as Strike, mute, allowed himself to be pulled into the cheesy display, a fake garden arch covered in fake green foliage and red plastic roses set against a plain background.

They turned to face the blonde woman who, still grinning in a slightly demented fashion in Strike’s opinion, started rearranging them, taking an arm of each. She tugged them this way and that while Strike tried not to bristle, and then she stood back.

“Great,” she beamed. “Put your arm around your girlfriend’s back, sir.”

Gritting his teeth, Strike laid a cautious hand in the small of Robin’s back, just above the swell of her arse that he could feel at his fingertips.

“Excellent!” Grace enthused. “Put your hand on his lapel, love.”

Robin dutifully laid her hand against Strike’s chest.

“Turn in a little more. Closer, that’s it. She won’t bite!” the photographer twittered, and Strike felt Robin move closer to him, her head practically against his shoulder, her hair almost under his chin.

“Now, gaze into each other’s eyes!” Grace cried, and Strike swallowed hard and looked down at Robin, inches from him as she gazed back up at him.

Her eyes danced with mirth, and he could see she was trying not to giggle, which almost, but not quite, took the tension out of the situation for him. He’d spent almost their entire acquaintance trying not to get this close to Robin physically lest he give himself away, and now her nose was inches from his, her laughing blue eyes pools he could have drowned in, and willingly, the subtle wash of her perfume making him think of warm skin—

“Smile!” called Grace, and Strike managed to pull his face into something he hoped resembled a grin, at which point Robin lost control of herself entirely and began giggling helplessly.

“Now, not quite so much,” Grace admonished, as Strike began reluctantly to laugh too. “Have you lovebirds been on the champagne already?”

Robin could make any awkward situation better, Strike thought with a rush of fondness, and for a moment his hand pressed a little more firmly against her back. She swayed willingly closer, laying her body against his for the briefest of moments, her eyes laughing joyously up at him, and he was struck anew by her beauty, by how incredibly lucky he was that she’d come into his life—

“Perfect!” A flurry of camera clicks accompanied Grace’s delighted shriek, and Strike remembered himself and pulled back a little, dropping his hand from Robin’s back. She drew hers away from the front of his jacket, and he told himself he’d imagined the slightly lost look on her face that mirrored the feeling in his chest.

Grace was fiddling with something in the camera, and waved them away cheerfully. “Go and see Hannah over there, she’ll print them for you,” she called, already turning to greet the next couple waiting at the door.

On autopilot, Strike followed Robin to the other end of the room, where another young woman, redheaded this time, sat at a computer. The printer was already whirring into life. Clearly the two women did this a lot.

“Here you go,” Hannah said briskly, sliding pictures, a couple of cardboard frames and a price list into an envelope and handing it over. “You get a six-by-four and a couple of passport sized ones free. Our contact details, your code and the price list are in there if you want more copies, just go to the website.” She grinned up at Robin as she handed over the pictures (to the woman, of course, the cynical part of Strike noted). “You should get this one blown up, it’s gorgeous,” she enthused, and then they were out the door and immediately being ushered into the main hall.

Robin opened the envelope at once.

“They’ll say that about all the pictures,” Strike said dismissively, but Robin made no reply, staring at the picture in her hand. Intrigued against his will, Strike looked over her shoulder.

Grace knew what she was doing. The background was just out of focus enough to make the arch and roses look real and pull the eye to the couple. They were stood, practically moulded together, Strike’s hand flexed against Robin’s back as he drew her closer, and her fingers curling a little into the material of his lapel. Her eyes sparkled up at him, and his answering, momentarily unguarded look of fondness had been captured perfectly. Every glinting detail from the red gold of her hair to the pendant at her throat to Strike’s cufflinks that she’d given him for his fortieth birthday a few months ago brought added sparkle to the scene, but it was the look they were sharing that made the picture perfect, as though there were, in that moment, no one else in the room.

Robin swallowed hard, and Strike took a step back.

“Drink?” he said roughly, and headed for the bar before she could answer.

He really hadn’t thought this through. The whole room was cheesily romantic, from the dimmed lighting to the glitter balls to the food already being laid out. Strike was intercepted yet again on his way to the bar and almost forcibly handed two glasses of champagne and a single red rose. He’d have given anything to dump the rose surreptitiously into a bin on his way back to Robin, but they had to play their parts; he reached her far too soon, as she was still stuffing the enveloped containing the photographs into her bag and looking as out-of-sorts as he felt. Self-consciously, he handed her a glass of champagne and the rose, and Robin giggled.

“Wow, this really is a cheese fest,” she said cheerfully, accepting both. “Cheers!” And they clinked glasses and drank and surveyed the room, and Strike pretended not to notice Robin gently tucking the rose into her bag, too, so that only the head emerged at the side, and they both pretended that everything was perfectly normal and that the picture in Robin’s bag just showed two mates on a night out together.

They were each hunting carefully for their mark, pretending to sip champagne and chat idly, but what was really snagging Strike’s attention was the number of sideways appreciative glances his partner was getting from other men. Men who were supposedly here with the love of their life, he thought a little crossly, men who had paid a lot of money to impress lovers and partners. He found himself bristling, glaring at a couple of them who looked away hurriedly.

Robin wasn’t his to be possessive over. He knew that. He just didn’t want her treated like an object. It was disrespectful, that was all.

“There he is,” Robin murmured out of the corner of her mouth. “Just getting his champagne and rose now.”

Strike followed her gaze and clocked their target, watching to see where he would take the drinks.

“So that’s who I need to try and befriend,” Robin went on, as their mark handed a glass and a flower to a petite blonde woman, who looked delighted.

“Ugh,” she added. “Why does the mistress always look like a younger version of the wife?”

Strike shrugged. “I guess they’re trying to recapture their youth.”

Robin scowled. “Well, why not do that with the person who can actually remember you when you were younger?”

Strike cast her a sideways glance, amused. “You’re the psychologist.”

The evening progressed achingly slowly. They queued for the buffet, ate at a table near their marks but not too near. It was hard to tell if they were just good friends, or a couple pretending to be only friends.

Strike wondered if he and Robin looked like a couple. She’d sat closer to him than she usually did, occasionally leaned and rested a hand on his shoulder to murmur a comment into his ear. She wasn’t being too overt, but it was definitely more than their usual level of contact.

He liked it. Far too much. Strike was beginning to wonder why on earth he had agreed to this torture.

His eyes sweeping the room again, looking for something - anything - to focus his attention on, Strike found himself idly watching an older guy eating alone. For a while he’d assumed the man’s date was in the toilets, but gradually it dawned on him that the older gentlemen was, in fact, here alone. Only one plate sat in front of him, two empty glasses which he’d clearly drunk himself, and the single rose lay by his plate. He occasionally glanced towards the door, but the slump of his shoulders suggested he’d given up waiting.

“Stood up?” Robin murmured, following his gaze.

“I guess,” Strike replied, feeling a decidedly un-Strikian lurch of sympathy run through him. “Poor sod.”

“I think it’s romantic.”

“Being stood up?” Strike’s voice betrayed his scepticism.

“Waiting anyway. Staying. Keeping her rose to take home. Maybe there’s a reason she’s not here. Maybe she’s still on her way.”

Strike resisted a snort, and dragged his gaze away to refocus on their mark, not wanting to analyse too closely why watching the older guy made him uncomfortable.

Plates cleared, couples began to drift onto the dance floor, but the detectives made no move. Strike wondered if Robin would want to dance, if he should be offering, but sideways movement wasn’t his forte, and now he was a couple of glasses of champagne and most of a passable pint of beer into his evening, he really didn’t think it was a very good idea to have her in his arms again—

“Loo,” Robin hissed, and with a start, Strike realised that the female half of their target couple was heading for the ladies’.

“Be right back, love,” Robin added warmly, and kissed his cheek before setting off across the room, her hips swaying and half the male eyes in the room on her backside.

Strike sat back and took a long, slow breath, relieved to have a few moments to gather his thoughts.

Too many things this evening were rocking his equilibrium. Robin looking so gorgeous, their gentle banter, the moment in the photo booth and then the blasted photographer managing to capture it. The rose, the champagne, the romance of the whole evening—

He could resist. He always resisted. It was what he did, out of respect for Robin and a longstanding fear that anything happening between them would fuck up the agency and ruin what they had worked so hard to build together.

And yet his gaze was drawn back to the older gentleman dining alone, and suddenly Strike remembered the day of his thirty-ninth birthday, meeting Robin in a pub for a totally different case and seeing an elderly lady there celebrating her eightieth. He remembered wondering if he would live to eighty, and if he did, who would be there with him.

The gentleman across the room wasn’t anywhere near that age, but he was a good decade older than Strike and wore no wedding ring. Not for the first time, Strike found himself wondering if a determinedly solitary life was still what he wanted. Did he want, at fifty, sixty, seventy, even eighty if he was lucky (and gave up smoking) to still be alone, living in a succession of small flats with only the television for company in the evenings? When Ted was no longer around either - and Strike needed to face that prospect - did he want to have Lucy clucking over him, fretting about him being alone and trying to get him to spend Christmas with her and Greg? That would actually be worse, Strike mused, than it was now while her sons were young and annoying. At least he could play computer games and watch kids’ films with them.

But more to the point, did he want to continue to pass up what he was becoming more and more sure was an opportunity that was there for the taking? If he didn’t ever at least try to form a romantic relationship with Robin, would he always regret it? Would he ever again meet anyone so suited to him on an emotional level, someone who cared about the job as much as he did, someone who valued independence like he did, someone he already got along with and cared deeply about, and yet was also (he could admit it to himself when she wasn’t standing right in front of him) someone he was powerfully attracted to—

“Got it!”

Robin was standing right in front of him.

“Um, what?” Knowing he had blushed red, Strike buried his face in his pint glass, swallowing the dregs to buy himself time to collect his thoughts.

“The evidence we need.” _Christ_ , she was sexy when she had just solved a case, animated and glowing, her cheeks flushed with the pleasure of her success. “I stuck my phone on record and got chatting with her in the ladies’. She even confided he’s promised to leave his wife for her, but he’s waiting for the wife’s dad to die so he can get half the inheritance she’s due. What an absolute arsehole, it’s going to be very satisfying to help her dump him before that happens!”

His thoughts back under control somewhat, Strike grinned up at her. “Well done. Excellent job.”

Robin beamed. “A good night’s work. Shall I get our coats?”

Strike hesitated. “Well, there’s no hurry. Another drink?” _What are you doing, Strike?_

Her astonishment would have been amusing if his heart hadn’t been banging so hard against his ribs that he felt a little sick. Strike never stayed longer on a case than he had to.

“Shame to get all dressed up and then...” he added helplessly.

“Um...yeah. Yeah, I’d like that.” Pink-cheeked, Robin sat back down, and Strike stood and strode towards the bar, trying not to think too hard about what he had just done.

By the time he returned with (on impulse) two more glasses of champagne, Robin was looking thoroughly bewildered.

And yet still stunningly beautiful. He’d been able to see men’s eyes on her again from the bar, and he had a sudden strong sense that he was going to miss this boat if he didn’t take action.

Movement outside the window caught his eye.

“Sleigh ride?” he suggested, offering her his arm. Even more bemused, Robin stood and tucked her hand into his elbow again. She took one of the glasses of champagne and followed him meekly. She didn’t say a word while they collected their coats, waited for a sleigh to become available, were helped into it and had a heated blanket settled around their legs. All too soon, the horse was trotting away around the little course that had been laid out around the grounds with fairy lights and artificial snow, and Strike hadn’t thought of a single word to express what he wanted to say. He didn’t even know how to start.

Robin sipped her champagne, and as the sleigh rounded the first corner, the bells on the harness jingling cheerfully, she allowed the sway of the movement to lean her against his upper arm, and she didn’t move away. Strike sipped his champagne too.

Was this the moment? The perfect moment? Luckily the driver of the sleigh, sat in front of them with the reins in his hands and gazing resolutely ahead, was sporting large ear muffs, ostensibly to keep warm but mostly, Strike assumed, worn deliberately to give the passengers a feeling of privacy. Idly Strike wondered how often affections were declared on these rides, marriage proposals made and accepted. Suddenly it all felt, rather than romantic, cheesy and hackneyed and laughably predictable. What had he been thinking?

If not now, though. When would he ever get another chance? The rest of their lives were carefully structured around the professional. At this rate it would be October and her next birthday before he had a reasonable excuse to ask her out again, and by then she might have met another Matthew.

With a slight feeling of panic, Strike realised they were more than halfway round the course already while he dithered. There had been a queue behind them waiting for their turn on a sleigh; he didn’t suppose asking to go round again would be well received. Perhaps it was too late. He had missed yet another opportunity.

Then Robin laid her head on his shoulder, and his arm somehow slid around her back and tugged her closer, and he felt her sigh.

Strike remembered his thirty-ninth birthday. He remembered the older gentleman at the ball alone, still hopeful of having found someone who wouldn’t stand him up, keeping the rose in case she was merely late. He remembered Nick telling him just last week that there never was a right moment, there were just moments. And when Robin tilted her head a little to look up at him, he kissed her.

He felt her jump a little in surprise, but she kissed him back at once. Her hand was resting on his thigh under the blanket, warm and firm, and his arm was still around her, his hand at her waist. He kissed her gently, slowly, and it was somewhere between heavenly and slightly awkward, because she tasted perfect and her lips were impossibly soft against his, yet they were still holding a glass of champagne each and sat right behind a total stranger who had presumably had to studiously ignore this kind of thing all night.

Strike drew back gently, and Robin grinned up at him, and he saw in her eyes the same mixture of fondness and amusement that he felt, delight at the not unexpected change in their relationship with a hint of laughter at the situation they found themselves in.

The sleigh pulled to a stop outside the building again, and Strike smiled softly down at Robin. “Shall we go home now?”

“Yes, let’s,” she replied as the driver climbed down and came to untuck the blanket and reach for Robin’s hand to help her down. “Together,” she added quietly before she turned to alight.

His heart hammering for an entirely different reason, Strike scrambled hurriedly after her.


End file.
